


The Making of Fate

by orphan_account



Category: The OC
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon, Community: fic_on_demand, Het, M/M, Slash, over 1000 words
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-10-29
Updated: 2006-10-29
Packaged: 2017-10-02 14:13:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Cohens never took Ryan in, but that didn't stop him finding his way to them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Making of Fate

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was written for a request on the LJ community Fic-on-Demand, a long time ago now. It's probably not consistent with show canon (even for an AU); I'm afraid I haven't seen much beyond the first season.

Ryan's lawyer told him he was lucky to be released on parole two days before his birthday. He doesn't feel lucky. Two years of juvenile hall take a long time to fall off one's stance, one's thoughts, one's definition of himself. He thinks of his pack of cigarettes as he waits for his turn at the office, where they'll hand him his old jacket and his set of keys to an apartment that probably belongs to someone else now. He hasn't heard from his mother in sixteen months. She could be anywhere.

They tell him he's a man now, responsible for his own actions, and capable of forming his own destiny. He doubts that. There are huge chunks of destiny that one man can't really do anything about. Destiny has left scars on the back of his legs, on his left shoulder, and he has a feeling there aren't a lot of the important choices ahead for him, anyway.

He takes his belongings and about a hundred dollars, and is escorted out the gate. And then he's free, except for a weekly responsibility to report to his parole officer. He walks in a slight daze the length of dirt road that goes around the hall and to the bus stop. He can see the routine going on on the other side of the fence; kids escorted from their department to the refreshment area. Willis is going to be beat up today, maybe raped. Ryan had considered doing something drastic to be able to stay behind and look after him just a couple of months more until it was his time to be up for parole. He didn't in the end.

He rolls up a cigarette and hates himself for a while.

-

Seth finally closed his laptop around 4 am, feeling eye-achingly tired but pleased. No-one, and he meant no-one could beat Choron the Tyrantslayer when he was on a roll like that night. Seth loved playing a clever barbarian. No one expected it. No more than the Spanish Inquisition, as they say. Maybe he'd play a halfling next time. There was no way they'd believe a halfling was at the head of a fantasy world version of a city-draining mafia.

He wandered to the bathroom for a drink of water - the soft drinks had run out an hour ago - and was surprised by the sight in the bathroom mirror. The white light was cruel but honest, and there were dark rings under his eyes like the moons of Mordor. He was even skinnier than last year. It was either that or develop a pouch, it seemed; the more popular beefy physique seemed destined to elude him forever.

He yawned, pissed, then brushed his teeth, and wandered back into his room to throw himself on the bed. He didn't sleep very well, his troubled dreams revolving around Choron being audited by polo-playing centaurs.

-

One year passed, and Ryan was working at a construction site in New York, building a second and entirely superfluous monument to 9/11, to sell more models to tourists. The change of states had been approved by his parole officer six months ago, when the work offer came. Ryan's boss had insisted on bringing him along to his new project. Not only did Ryan have a knack for the work, he did it for two thirds of the ordinary pay. You didn't get much choice when you were straight out of juvy. The records might be sealed, but employers weren't deaf, nor blind. Ryan didn't mind. It was still more than he'd ever made before in his life, and enough to rent a tiny apartment on the outskirts of the city. It wasn't even the worst possible neighbourhood. There hadn't been repairs in the building since the early 90s, but everything worked (at least after Ryan fixed the kitchen plumbing) and there were hardly any cockroaches. Directly below him was a new age store run by a lesbian couple, and the smell of incense wafted up to him on hot summer days when an open window had to stand in for a fully functional air conditioning system.

He was seeing a waitress in the cafeteria on the opposite side of the street, but if he was completely honest, it was mostly for her apartment's air conditioning. He missed Theresa so bad sometimes it hurt. Not the sex - not even the girl as she was these days. He missed being around someone who understood him as well as Theresa had, once upon a time.

The waitress's name was Shelly. On weekends she was an actress in an off-off-Broadway play. She was a stage actress, she often pointed out, who wanted to be a movie actress, in a city where the movie stars came to get on stage. Her hair was blonde, and she was nothing at all like Theresa.

He'd visited Theresa only twice after getting off. Her daughter was a scrunchy-faced, frightening, squealing thing, and Ryan was surprised at how little he envied her father.

-

College was freedom.

It took some time, but when it finally dawned on Seth, it was like the first sunrise over the dark waters of the freshly created world.

The first odd thing about college that really struck him was the way people talked to him like he was a real person, like he had opinions worth listening to, or that he was, on the whole, nothing at all like the sort of things you might find under an ancient rock. And these weren't just the odd, nerdy people like he had always considered himself to be; beautiful girls, football players, goths in ten layers of black and white make-up. He felt like he'd fallen through a cosmic hole into some kind of a mirror reality where he was suddenly cool.

His roommate was a soccer jock called Duke, whose girlfriend was all sinuous grace with long dark hair, and they practically dragged him out with them into a beach party on his first weekend. Seth sat on a towel drinking beer and watching the girls and boys chase the ball across the beach, and felt… included.

They stayed until sunrise, and Seth and Duke went home singing loudly and giggling about the stupidest things. The next morning Seth joined the comic book club, signed up for art classes, and met Tina.

-

Two years after juvy, Ryan had just moved in with Shelly's air conditioning, when three things happened. First, he was accepted for night courses in the NYC on the subject of architecture. Second, he finally completed his parole period. Third, Shelly got an offer of a small part in a Hollywood movie, and was to fly to Los Angeles as soon as possible.

Ryan had been working hard to afford and qualify for those classes. He'd worked long hours at the construction site every day to afford the studies that then swallowed up all his evenings, and between them had hardly had time for his girlfriend. That had been one of the reasons behind the move; it meant breakfasts together, at least, unless Shelly was working the night shift and wanted to sleep in. They needed time together, Shelly said, since they'd been having problems.

The problem, Ryan supposed, was just that he didn't, never had, and never expected to really love Shelly, and that Shelly felt pretty much the same about him. Neither of them was good at being alone, though. Shelly tried, in her own way. She found games and outfits for the bedroom that had for a while at least piqued Ryan's interest, embarrassing as they mostly were. Ryan tried, by making her dinner when he could, and loving her as much as he could without ever really feeling it.

They never exactly discussed it, when the offer came. It was understood, after a breakfast half made of silences and half of inference, that Ryan would be staying, and Shelly would be going. There was really not enough reason for them in their relationship to not split at this point. That night Ryan made love to her as gently and urgently as he ever had, and maybe they even cried a little, though really, both of them knew very well they'd had the best of luck, to end this way.

Shelly decided to host a small going-away party. They pooled what little excess money they had for booze and treats, opened all windows and spread some chairs up front of the building, and invited all the neighbours just to stop them from complaining. Shelly was good at making friends, and the news spread quickly, until they had in their hands something resembling a small block party. Shelly's friends from the theater showed up with their dates and children and Shelly's family came over from up-state. The street lighted up, and music flowed through open windows, and all in all the mood was more European than New York - at least that's what Shelly's sister Tina, who had been overseas, said. 'But this is a good neighbourhood,' said Mrs Chavez from 2a, defending the block she'd lived in all her life.

-

Tina wanted to write her thesis on graphic novels. Seth never understood wanting to study them but not to draw them, and told her so on a regular basis. She told him he could do the drawing, and she'd just stand in the sidelines and make snide comments about phallic symbology in action layouts.

Seth forgave her, and not because she relieved him of his boyhood two weeks into their relationship and continued to re-implement the associated action throughout the next semester, but because she really, truly, honestly loved good comics. Thanks to her, Seth soon found himself better at layouts, story structuring, moderate cliché-dodging, and, of course, the arts of love. She called him a natural in all fields.

Tina wore small fussy glasses, her short green hair stickining in all directions, and painted shoes. Sandy loved her.

Before Seth was allowed to take her home for the summer vacation he'd have to be approved by her family. Meeting them got rescheduled over and over again, and it was already nearly vacation time when it was finally settled that they should all meet at Tina's sister's going-away party in New York, where the family was from. Even that was endangered by the arrival of the unmissable Jim Lee in their college town on a lecture tour, but they were determined, and so took an afternoon plane and then a cab directly to the party. They were tired and sweaty when they arrived, but Tina was so excited she could barely sit still.

The cab drove around the corner into a brightly lit street and stopped. Seth wasn't sure what he'd expected, but not this. In one building the doors and windows were thrown open on every floor, and fold-out tables and chairs were set in the streets, filled with quickly disappearing snacks and plastic cups for the punch. There was music coming out of the windows, pumping loud, and a crowd was gathered in front of it, talking and laughing. There was a ring of spectators watching a young man spin and convulse in a complicated dance.

'Sure we're in the right city?' asked Seth as they climbed out of the cab.

'Welcome to the real New York,' said Tina, and then let out a strangled sort of a squeal as she rushed into the arms of a pretty blonde girl across the street.

-

Shelly's mother, who owned a bookstore up-state, was tall and thin. Her knees and arms were bony, the unattractive thinness that age only emphasizes. Her height gave her an authority, but her smiles made her loveable. She was the sort of a person even the most die-hard chauvinist would gladly vote for president. Shelly's father, by comparison, was short and round and jolly. They called themselves an exclamation mark-point couple, and shared a series of injokes with their daughters. Ryan smiled at them in baffled longing as the conversation drifted into hometown friends and relatives, leaving him standing outside their little sphere with Tina's boyfriend. They shared a glance of understanding - he was a tall thin dark-haired young man who still conjured the word boy, for some reason - and smiled.

'Come on,' said Ryan. 'I'll show you where the drinks are.'

Seth Cohen was in college, and wanted to be a comic book artist. Ryan doubted quietly if there was any money in that. He'd had the chance, in the past couple of years, of meeting a lot of artists who were living more or less hand-to-mouth, always looking for the next bed or bottle to enjoy. He looked like a well-to-do young man, and further discussion confirmed the suspicion. Ryan had begun to like him, but now money lodged between them like an unpassable canyon.

Seth noticed Ryan growing quieter, and Ryan noticed him noticing, and they stood silently for a while, Ryan smoking, Seth nursing a drink, while the music and the noise went on all around. Ryan looked longingly back to where Shelly and her family were still standing together, talking to the new age lesbians, and thought of all the things he didn't have a right to.

'So what do your folks do?' asked Seth at last.

'Nothing. I don't know.' Ryan didn't say a word about his missing mother, or his brother who was in jail still; not because he was embarrassed, but because he had no mind to make Seth even more uncomfortable. He clammed up; that, too, had been one of his and Shelly's problems.

'Have you known Shelly long?' said Seth, in one last desperate attempt at conversation. He didn't want to leave Ryan alone. He knew all about being excluded. He didn't want to be left alone, either, with all these people he still wasn't entirely convinced weren't drug dealers.

Ryan looked like everything Seth wasn't, from his thick, strong arms and casual outfit to the effaced, self-contained angle of his chin. At second glance, there was gentleness in the curve of his shoulders. (Some part of Seth's mind filed this in the back of his mind for use later in a character design.)

'Almost two years,' said Ryan, dropping his cigarette and stomping it out. 'She's a good kid.'

'Yeah,' said Seth, who wouldn't know. 'A Los Angeles deal, wow.' It felt like a lame thing to say, but he was grasping at straws now.

'It must be nice,' said Ryan.

'You're going too, right?'

'No.'

'Oh. I'm sorry.'

Ryan shrugged.

-

Seth's summer that year began with two weeks of heaven. He showed his own new confidence around town as much as he did his pretty new girlfriend. Sunlight suddenly felt like the ever-positive, happy natural phenomenon metaphors always painted it as, rather than the baleful white light it had been during his high school years; the beach was suddenly filled with happy, beautiful people, rather than enemies, and he could even look at polo players and smile.

It all went downhill from there.

Tina became distant, moody, absent. In about three weeks Seth was convinced she was lying to him, and had already suspected a hundred horrible scenarios from drugs to a secret plot to kill him with heartache. It was like Summer all over again. The one thing he had not considered turned out to be the case. He looked into the pool house one afternoon, and saw Tina with Marissa Cooper, all thin limbs, long hair and well-cared-for skin tangled up and writhing. He'd moved away before they'd even noticed him.

That was it, then. She'd found something he just couldn't compete with. He really, he told himself, should have known. He spent the evening in his room staring at his old posters and slowly convincing himself the past year had been some sort of a dream and that in the morning he'd be seventeen again and just as miserable, just as much of an outcast, and just as ready to die for one single friend.

-

'The world isn't actually small,' Seth said. 'The chances of two people moving in and out of each other's lives are ruled by a set of probabilities, but two people who have met before have a greater likelihood of meeting again by so-called chance than two specific people who were never introduced.'

An amused expression visited Ryan's face. 'How is that?'

'For one, I may have passed a dozen people I saw in New York since last week, but neither they or I would know it, because we don't remember each other. I remembered you, so I recognised you. And you may have, even if you didn't entirely notice it, have come here, to this particular university, to repair that particular sorority house, because you remembered me.'

'Seems a little far-fetched,' said Ryan, though the fact was that he had remembered Seth, and that this was the college where Shelly's sister and her awkwardly polite boyfriend had gone to, and it wasn't entirely impossible that this was why he'd wandered to the college lawn to have his lunch. The contract was a complete coincidence, though.

'Indulge me,' said Seth, waving his hand. 'I could never write this into a comic, it would feel contrived, but this sort of thing happens all the time in real life.'

Ryan shrugged, a motion Seth still remembered from a lamp-lit New York street party a year ago. It looked different here, under the shade of the biggest of the campus trees, with sunlight painting patterns of leaves on Ryan's blue T-shirt.

-

Duke and Viola were still together, blast them. They'd got engaged last summer, around the time Tina was discovering girls. Viola had acquired an apartment off-campus, which left the room mostly to Seth. This was, at first, the good part about all this, for he'd come to appreciate privacy since coming back. It was better for studying, and certainly much better for the sort of moping a break-up seemed to require. Seth was a supreme moper, and had intended to do a great deal of it.

The bad thing, at first, had been that whenever Duke did make an appearance he was disgustingly happy and kept mentioning Viola in every other sentence. Seth indulged in a few biting remarks about being tied to her apron strings, but Duke just placidly pointed out that Viola didn't cook. Not a word, even, about how Seth had behaved around Tina last semester. His drama denied, Seth had been forced to settle for moping.

That was, as said, at first.

Now the privacy was a temptation, a horrible opening for the sort of things he shouldn't even think about doing. It was all Ryan's fault. His company had a two-month contract, and it had only taken about a week before Seth had decided he wanted to keep Ryan for a lot longer than that.

They'd gone out drinking one night, and hadn't drunk more than a beer each, but gone walking instead down to the harbour after Seth had mentioned a 19th century lighthouse that was still in use, barely modernised at all. It turned out to be too dark to see it properly, so they decided to come back later, but all the way there and back they talked, and Seth went back to his room feeling something new and odd and frightening. It wasn't like with Tina, or like with Duke and the guys at the comic book club. It was different, large and good and soft and suffocating.

He wanted to invite Ryan back to his room. He wanted to invite him to stay. He couldn't, of course, because he knew that if he did, he'd jump Ryan's bones. And that might scare him away forever.

There was also the sexual orientation concern, but somehow it didn't seem to matter nearly as much.

-

Ryan liked watching Seth. Seth was not very good at hiding anything; not really; not when you paid attention.

He watched him now, as Seth went through his vegetarian taco wrap ritual. Seth liked the sort that were nearly impossible to eat, with loosely rolled bread around a sauce-drenched mess of falafel and salad. He'd take off the the paper wrappings carefully, open the roll, cut the bread into pieces, arrange one piece and a chunk of the insides onto a fork, and half the time still manage to spill it all over himself before it reached his mouth.

'Why don't you just get kebab?' Ryan asked, amused.

'Do you know how kebab is made?' asked Seth in a reproachful tone. 'Anyway, they probably put pig in it, and my Jewish half objects.' He launched his mouth at a forkful of falafel and sauce, managing to just hit his mouth on it before it toppled off and back on to the plate. 'Ah, dammit!'

Ryan leaned over and grabbed Seth's collar, pulling him towards him over the table, and closed his mouth on the mess at the corner of Seth's mouth. He licked it clean, then moved his mouth just slightly to press it against Seth's.

He made it one of his better kisses. There was no objection, no obstruction: mere shocked acquiescence.

He pulled back to see Seth's eyes closed, his face slightly flushed. Then he blinked and looked at Ryan with a look that could only be described as shy.

'Better luck with the next bite,' said Ryan with a small smile.

-

Seth graduates at age 24; after two college transfers, Ryan is still taking classes, even though he already has his own first building design approved by the city of Newport. Kirsten swears she had nothing to do with it, and maybe she didn't; a word dropped into a certain ear about her protégé hardly counts for much with a city council, even if the dropper is Caleb Nichol's daughter. For the most part Ryan is satisfied to consider himself extremely lucky, and perhaps a little talented, too.

They have an apartment downtown, just a walk and a run from the studio where Ryan's completing his internship.

It's the anniversary of the day he was released from juvy. He remembers it suddenly when his eye hits a piece of news in the morning paper.

He puts the paper down slowly, his shoulders tightening perceptibly. Seth glances from the fridge, and a question about the milk's sell-by date dies on his lips at the sight. Ryan still isn't terribly expressive, but he's had years of experience reading him.

'What is it?' he asks, crouching to give his boyfriend a kind of an awkward half-hug.

'Nothing,' Ryan says, and then remembers he's not supposed to clam up like that anymore. 'An old friend's been killed.'

'Oh man. Who?'

'Some guy I knew in juvy.'

He feels almost proud of Willis. It's a strange thing to feel about someone who gunned down three people before he was killed, but it still is good to know that Willis went down fighting, at least. The guys were dealers and pimps. Ryan can fill in the blanks.

'It's not just luck,' he says quietly.

'What isn't?' Seth is completely wrapped around him now.

'This.' Ryan turns and kisses Seth quickly. 'It's part work, part fate. That could've been me. Well, that, or something like it. I can't believe how fucking, unbelievably good I have it.' He twists around in the chair to pull Seth into his lap and kiss him thoroughly, completely, deeply.

He'll be late for work, and Seth will have to postpone his rigorous layouting schedule for the day, but come hell or high water they are going to fuck right now, long and hard, because life will not get any better than this, and if they don't Ryan knows he will burst like a weak dam at the pressure of all this violent emotion.

By the catching of Seth's breath, and the pressure on his side, he knows Seth is getting the picture, too. 'Just let me call my letterer-'

'Okay,' says Ryan, and nibbles a little on Seth's neck, busies his hands further down on Seth's anatomy, and knows there'll be no further argument.

An hour later, they've made their way to the living room sofa, much more comfortable than the kitchen floor, and lie in a satisfied circle of limbs and sweat. Still they kiss, but there's no urgency of lust, now.

'I love you.'

'I love you.'

They don't say it often. They don't need to.


End file.
